Safe
by Sunbird Riding Shotgun
Summary: Eliot doesn't sleep much, but there are times he can't sleep at all.
1. Safe

**Notes:** Takes place sometime after The Two Live Crews Job.

* * *

**Safe**

* * *

Eliot didn't sleep.

Much.

Sometimes he wondered if one of these days he was gonna just drop the much and stop sleeping all together. After all under normal circumstances he only slept an hour and a half every a night. People, normal people, had to get at least five or six hours. Often they had to get more.

If he could cut down on sleep to where he was completely functional with only a fourth of the sleep people normally had to get to be at all functional what was to say he couldn't train himself to function without sleep at all. Sure, people went crazy and died without sleep.

Would that be anything new to him?

Tonight was one of the nights when he really started to wonder if he'd one day stop needing to sleep altogether. It was nearly five in the morning. He usually would have been asleep by now. Hell he usually would have been asleep and have woken up by now.

When had it become habit for him to sleep at some point between two and five in the morning? It was a habit and he did his best to eliminate those from his life. Habits meant you were predictable. Being predictable meant your enemy could predict your next move. Your enemy predicting your next move meant you had to either predict their next move in response to predicting your move or you'd likely end up dead.

Maybe it was a good thing he couldn't sleep.

Eliot leaned back in the comfortable leather chair that looked out through a window over the city and tried to force his mind to process the fact that the glass was bullet proof and ignore that there was no such thing. There were plenty of types of ballistics that could shoot through bullet proof glass. He could list them all by name and recognize nearly every one by gun shot sound.

He got up and closed the curtains before moving to the couch in his living room which had no external windows. He resisted the temptation to put his back to a wall, or preferably a corner, and instead lay down on the couch and stared up at the ceiling.

He'd turned off every light in his apartment. He'd known the floor plan within an hour of living here. He kept the place clean and in order. He didn't need lights to know where everything was.

He'd never admit it but there were times when the dark made him feel safe.

Under normal circumstances he didn't like perfect dark. He liked being able to see his enemy, and light kept back memory of things done in the darkness, things done to him…

And by him.

But there were times when the darkness wasn't a threat or that dark thing inside him trying to drag him down again.

Sometimes… sometimes darkness was protection from things. Sometimes oblivion swallowed the bad things up before they reached him. Sometimes darkness was safe. After all it was Light that always intruded on darkness when the bad things came.

Like the hallway light under a bedroom door.

Like the lights in a cell glaring on before guards came in to drag you away for another round of torture.

Like the orders from a nation commanding him to kill for their greater "good".

Like the burst of light in every word before the broken hallelujah.

And now he was thinking himself in circles.

He'd made his apartment dark to try to feel safe.

He didn't feel safe.

But that wasn't why he couldn't sleep.

Over the years he's perfected the fine art of staying alive and part of that, he's pretty sure, is his subconscious developing a method of keeping him from being distracted. Whenever there's something going on in his life, or even just in his head, that in others might result in brooding (or, in Nate's case, the act or temptation of drinking) he didn't get pissed off (no, he didn't seem to need a reason to get pissed) he did however suddenly became very preoccupied with his personal safety.

So, distantly, Eliot was aware that he was actually brooding about Sophie, even if he wasn't actually brooding or thinking about Sophie. His inability to relax had little to do with the dozen odd assault rifles he could name off the top of his head that could go right through his bullet resistant window or the fact he knew at least one person could enter his apartment without his knowledge even when he was wide awake.

He both was and wasn't actually wondering if Nate would start drinking again with Sophie gone or if they'd be able to work through this or hell, if Sophie was going to be safe without him.

His mind rambling on about habits being the enemy and how he's gone to the same grocer three times in a row and maybe he should throw out all the food he just got because it might have been tampered with is not actually his paranoia getting out of hand. It's mostly the fact that somewhere along the line his nightmare scenario changed from someone catching him off guard, capturing him, and selling him to the highest bidder (he knew Myanmar had a 500,000 dollar bounty on his head but he was less worried about them and more worried about the 7 separate private individuals who had million dollar bounties for him being captured alive) and had somehow become someone (anyone) hurting anyone on the team.

He knew that even though he couldn't sleep because he kept thinking of ways the people who wanted him dead could make him so he really couldn't sleep because when he'd done his final check to make sure everyone was safe at home for the night he hadn't been able to check in on Sophie. She was over seas, in Europe Somewhere, and a lot farther from him than he was comfortable with.

Eliot had learned a long time ago that he couldn't protect everyone he care about, that he couldn't save the world or even his own private world, and he couldn't control the violence.

But he had spent his entire life learning how to protect himself, and how to fight to protect those he cared about. And maybe he couldn't save everyone, or anyone, but he knew that the team, these people, that had become his family. He knew as long as he was with them, as long as he was near them, he could protect them from the world he fought in and the life he'd lead and the pain he knew.

As long as there was breath in his body he'd put himself between the team and any danger.

He would protect them.

But Sophie was across the ocean and out of reach.

And Eliot was lieing, in the dark, curled up in a ball on his couch, trying to make his mind stop playing out worse case scenarios long enough for him to get at least a little sleep so when he went over to Nate's later Nate wouldn't read the exhaustion in his frame again and get That _Look_.

Sophie wasn't safe and Eliot didn't think he'd feel safe until she was back where he could keep an eye on her again.

Maybe by then he'd learn to function without sleep.


	2. Comfort

**Comfort**

* * *

Sophie didn't sleep.

Much.

She used to.

She used to take a measure of pride in the fact that she could sleep soundly through the night. There are plenty of sayings out there about the sinful sleeping badly and she enjoyed disproving them. She didn't feel guilt for the crimes she had committed and she was confident enough in her own abilities that she rarely feared for her own safety.

She wasn't sure how that had become sipping coffee at ten in the morning after finally giving up on getting any sleep.

She wasn't sure how long this could go on before she just stopped sleeping all together.

Could she do that? She'd gone from a decent ten hours of sleep a night (when she wasn't on a job) not much more than a year ago to now.

First she'd cut it down to seven or eight, a few hours lost to tossing and turning and Not brooding about the team, or trying to think of some way to *fix* what she broke, or reasoning and convincing herself that the rest of the team didn't hate her and that she wouldn't really care if they did.

After they got their revenge on Blackpool she'd started sleeping a bit more easily again. She had closure. The others were fine and _They _were fine.

She wasn't sure when she started having trouble sleeping again, trying to piece together some way to fix what she'd broken again. Only fix it so it stayed fixed. So they stayed together.

They came back together and she was okay, and they were okay.

But then Kathrine rejoined the ranks of the single, and Whitmark happened, and… everything else and she was sleeping less and less and when she did sleep she dreamed vaguely, disturbing images and blurred fears warping together to chase her back to the land of the waking.

She'd left for a lot of reasons, and for one big one.

But now she was out here in London, staring up at the grim gray sky, wondering if she'd be able to make the jump between two or three hours of sleep to none. Sure, people went crazy and died without sleep.

Would that really be anything new to her?

She sat down in the armchair in front of her window, overlooking the city, and placed her cup on the table next to it.

Long delicate fingers trailed from the cup to what looked like an old fashion lighter sitting on the table where she'd left it the day before.

It looked like an old fashion lighter, boxy metal with engravings and a top you flicked open, but it wasn't. Sophie couldn't even remember when exactly Hardison had given it to her and told her what it was, how to use it, and that he was following Eliot's orders and that both he and Nate also had one.

It was a panic button. Flick it open and press and the gps transmitter inside would turn on and the entire team would know within seconds that there was something going down and she needed help.

The entire team would know, but Eliot would be the one who came to her rescue.

In their entire time together Sophie had never needed to use it, but somewhere along the line it became a sort of talisman for bad days and dark alleys when she was feeling a little more vulnerable than she'd admit later. She would never, ever, admit that to her it meant she would always have backup, always have friends, family, ready to make sure she never again had to do some of the things she'd done in her life to get out of a bad situation.

She'd also never admit that she had carried it around London with her for over a week.

Maybe it was the panic button, or the fact she'd been surviving on so little sleep, or the way she realized at four in the morning she was still waiting to hear the sound of Eliot's motorcycle as he drove by her house because "he was in the neighborhood" in the middle of the night.

Maybe it was because she'd cycled through all the team more than once over the course of the night and it was just Eliot's turn again.

But Sophie was thinking about Eliot.

She was thinking about Eliot and how she couldn't deny that a part of her was still waiting to hear him ride by on his nightly check to make sure they were all clear.

She was thinking about how the food at her favorite local restaurants didn't taste as good as the last time she was here and maybe Eliot was to blame.

She was thinking about how the team really needed a grifter and without one jobs were more likely to go south. Jobs that went south meant Eliot had to fight and when Eliot had to fight Eliot got hurt. Most of the time it was just little things. A cut here, a bruise there, and it hurt a little to see the marks of his job written on his skin (though Sophie knew he did make a conscious effort to hide as much of it as he could) but they learned to let the little things go.

But the farther south a job went the more fights Eliot fought and the harder they were and the more likely it was the damage wouldn't just be the little things.

Two broken ribs and a concussion had weighed heavier on Sophie's mind than all the crimes she'd ever committed rolled together. She would never admit it, or apologize, that wasn't her style, but she knew that Eliot's fight with Quin had happened because of her. She was responsible for those injuries.

She honestly wasn't sure she could handle it if her absence resulted in more.

A motorcycle drove by outside and Sophie nearly stood before she forced herself to relax. It wasn't Eliot, and not just because Eliot was on the other side of an ocean. The motorcycle sound was wrong. His bike had a very distinctive sound.

That brought a small, bittersweet, smile to her face.

She was still waiting for a very distinctive sound she was never (no, that she wasn't) going to hear.

She flicked the panic button open and wondered if she pressed it how long it would take Eliot to get here.

She shut it.

No reason to worry them.

And she was the one who wanted space.

But they were the ones who kept calling her.

She stood and went into her living room, sitting on the couch and picking her cell phone off the coffee table.

She shouldn't call. It was five in the morning in Boston.

But it's not like Eliot would be sleeping.

Eliot didn't sleep much.

What reasoning could she give for calling?

_I couldn't sleep because you hadn't been by to pretend you weren't checking up on me and I thought if I called to let you know I'm alright that would make me able to sleep._

_Because when you used to drive by every night it reminded me that even if I knew nothing else, even if nothing else made sense, even if I didn't even know who I was, I had a team that would have my back no matter what._

_And that, somehow, that very distinctive motorcycle noise roaring through a silent night, was the last thing I'd hear before I fell asleep._

_Right._

_Maybe I'll tell him I'm trying to make an omlette and don't know what I'm doing._

_Yeah. We'll go with that._

Eliot answered the phone on the second ring. "Sophie? Need somthin'?"

Sophie opened her mouth to spout off babble about her inability to make an omelet, maybe having something to do with the French.

But all that came out was. "It's all quiet here, Eliot."

There was a long pause and Sophie was calling herself eleven kinds of idiot and preparing a defense with Sophie when Eliot simply said. "Good. Get some sleep. Ya sound tired."

Sophie swallowed the feeling climbing up her throat and nodded, despite him not able to see her. "Yeah. You too."

"Hey, Soph." Eliot said after another pause. "…I'm not in your neighborhood much, so call and tell me the all clear whenever you want." There was a beat and Sophie could almost swear Eliot muttered. "I worry 'bout ya sometimes."

"Me to." Sophie said, closing her eyes. Eliot dead or hurt would always be a nightmare scenario but hearing his voice… "Get some sleep." She said simply. "Hardison and Parker will be annoying you in only a few short hours. You'll need your strength."

Eliot made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Alright. G'night." He hung up before she could respond.

Sophie put the phone down and laid down on the couch, feeling what was left of her energy drain away. She watched the early morning light cast shadows across the far wall for a moment before her eyes slipped closed.

She dreamed about lighters and omelets, the very distinctive sound of a motorcycle, and a figure on a couch in a pitch black room that she slowly began to be able to make out as the first light of dawn crept in from the door to the kitchen and lit across Eliot Spencer's sleeping face.


End file.
